I went to see Avatar: The Way of Water in one of the 4,100 theaters that the highly anticipated movie debuted in last night. The film was billed as one of the major blockbusters of the year. The first Avatar, released all the way back in 2009, was “the highest-grossing movie in history,” Variety reports. So the sequel had big shoes to fill. On Thursday, Box Office Mojo wrote:
However The Way of Water performs, it is certain to follow a different, more front-loaded trajectory. The opening weekend could be the year’s biggest (Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’ $187 million debut is current champion), and it may even join the club of just eight films so far to open above $200 million. Still, whether it performs like a “normal” big blockbuster or another title for the record books is something we won’t know until the follow-up weekends. There’s no official word on what the budget is, but [Avatar director David] Cameron claims the film will need to be “the third or fourth highest-grossing film in history” to break even, which would mean a gross of above $2 billion (keep in mind no film since 2019 has gotten that high). Veracity of that statement aside, the legs will be the real story here, just as with Cameron’s earlier blockbusters. Thankfully, critics are saying the film exhibits no signs of a sophomore slump, with the 81% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes being practically on par with the first film, and many reviews are calling it another must-see big-screen experience.
It was . . . well, it was okay. It was a fun movie, if you’re watching from the mindset of a viewer looking for some relatively mindless entertainment rather than a film critic. (And there’s nothing wrong with that, to be clear; I’m no film critic). The film’s calling card, much like the first Avatar, was its amazing visual effects — what Vox’s film critic described as its “big-screen awe.” That alone makes the movie entertaining, with groundbreaking underwater animation and sweeping CGI landscapes bringing the foreign planet where the film is based to life.
But the animation has to make up for a lot of other deficiencies. The silly, cliché anti-colonial political subtext — the indigenous Na’vi are the Native Americans, the humans are the white settler-colonists, and so on — is relatively easy to ignore; for the most part, the film doesn’t hit you over the head with it. But the dialogue is uncreative and corny, the plot is mostly predictable, and the acting is often overdone. That can be put aside when the truly awe-inspiring visual effects start to take center stage in the second half of the film — which is itself a half-hour too long, sliding in at a whopping 3 hours and 12 minutes of runtime — so I warmed up to Avatar 2 after being sorely disappointed by the first quarter. (I have a record of this disappointment in my phone: About 25 minutes in, I texted a group chat with my other friends in the theater: “This movie sucks so far.”) It’s worth going to see, but I don’t think it’s winning any prizes for screenwriting.